Nothing like a dame

The Australians for Constitutional Monarchy website was, if not triumphalist, quick to claim credit for Prime Minister
Tony Abbott’s
decision to restore the awarding of knighthoods and damehoods.

“This is the culmination of a long campaign by ACM," the organisation said.

The ACM had lodged a petition last year in which it “specified that governors-general be willing to accept the award of such high honours as Her Majesty The Queen may be pleased to confer".

In the event, the Prime Minister did not go as far as his friends and former colleagues in the ACM movement would have wished – the ACM prefers a restoration of imperial honours – but he took a fairly substantial step in their direction by reviving the titles of knight and dame in the Order of Australia.

This required an alteration to the Letters Patent changed under the Hawke government in 1986 to get rid of what that administration regarded as an archaic system out of step with community aspirations.

The Queen herself brought the practice of state Coalition governments awarding imperial honours to an end in 1994, no doubt on advice that such awards had become a farce.

That was the end of that as far as most Australians were concerned as they accommodated themselves to an uncomplicated systems of honours in various categories, civil and military, under the rubric of the Order of Australia honours system.

Relics of the past

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Distinguished scientist Sir
Gustav Nossal
, knighted in 1977, gave voice to a general view that knighthoods and damehoods belonged in another era when he said on Wednesday the “imperial honours system is something out of the past."

Most Australians would agree with him, but for his own reasons Abbott – he neither consulted the Coalition party-room nor the cabinet – has confounded his supporters by going back over old ground.

Red-blooded Republicans like
Malcolm Turnbull
have sought to make light of the affair, but behind the scenes a fair number of Abbott’s parliamentary colleagues are incredulous.

One likened his decision to his “back-of-the-envelope" paid parental leave scheme that was sprung on his party seemingly out of nowhere.

If nothing else this reminds people the Prime Minister is a traditionalist who is not afraid to court censure in defence of beliefs that underpin his political values.

Speculation that he’s authorised the restitution of a system redolent of the past as part of a plan to revive the culture wars of the Howard era may have some validity as a means of stimulating a conservative base.

But a more reasonable explanation would seem to be that Abbott actually believes in these sorts of traditions and is prepared to assert those beliefs. He has gone further than his mentor
John Howard
in this case since Howard had considered restoring a system of knights and dames but in the end decided not to. Howard was described as a “conviction" politician. Abbott may lay claim to a similar description.

Hints in Abbott’s memoirs

A re-reading of that section in his book, Battlelines, where he deals with the monarchy, provides clues to Abbott’s motivations – expressed, as they are, cryptically – in his ­distinction between liberals in the American sense and conservatives like him.

Abbott does not deal directly with the abolition of the system of imperial honours in Battlelines, but has this to say about his own monarchical beliefs:

“To liberals (small ‘l’), the monarchy tends to be dispensable because it can be made to appear a historical accident or even offensive to anti-discrimination principles," he writes. “To conservatives, on the other hand, apart from it being a subtle and stable system, ‘the heart has reasons that reason cannot know’."

Among Abbott’s parliamentary colleagues Attorney-General
George Brandis
has been most forthright in his defence of the Prime Minister’s decision.

At the 2020 summit, as Abbott records in Battlelines, Brandis was the only participant to support the Crown, but this position sits oddly with the Attorney-General’s description of himself as a “Deakinite Liberal." Arguably, Australia’s greatest prime minister,
Alfred Deakin
,refused a knighthood on a number of occasions, long before a system of imperial honours was abolished by the Whitlam government in 1975 and replaced with an Australian honours system.

Brandis’s assertion on ABC Radio that knighthoods are “as relevant today as they have been in times past" is questionable, as is his claim that Abbott’s monarchism is “absolutely in step" with community ­aspirations.

Australians ‘egalitarian’ people

“The fact is Australians are egalitarian people and the fact that people may have titles is no threat to our egalitarianism," Brandis said.

Brandis, it might be noted, recently entered the debate over the restitution of the royalist Queens Council for senior barristers. These nominals have been reinstated in Queensland and Victoria, but New South Wales is resisting.

This prompted Brandis to describe the NSW bar as a “bastion of Keating-era republican sentiment".

Sydney silk
Alexander Street
responded that he could think of no greater compliment than to be regarded as “Keatingesque".

Brandis is moving to give Commonwealth Senior Counsel (SCs) the option of calling themselves QCs. He himself is a QC by virtue of his membership of the Queensland bar.

In his decision to reinstate vice-regal titles within the Order of Australia Abbott said he had “taken soundings in the community" but in the end it was his decision alone to recommend such a course of action to the Queen. It is likely that apart from consulting his friends in the ACM – where he was executive director during the campaign against a Republic – Abbott will have considered practice in other jurisdictions, including New Zealand, possibly Canada and perhaps as far afield as the Caribbean.

Following New Zealand

New Zealand’s experience may have been the most instructive – and influential. In 2000, then prime minister
Helen Clark
announced that no further imperial awards would be made in the NZ honours system.

That continued until the defeat of the New Zealand Labour government. Conservative Prime Minister
John Key
restored the practice of knighthoods and damehoods in 2009 with recipients of the highest grades of the New Zealand Order of Merit being given the option of converting them to titles.

Few have done so. Abbott himself has said that Companions of the Order of Australia (AC’s) would not be entitled to convert. He is restricting numbers of knight and dames to four each year, but having re-established a precedent there would be nothing to prevent conservative state governments following suit. In one regard Abbott is unlikely to ­follow Key’s lead, and that is in the latter’s determination to conduct a poll to change New Zealand’s flag on the basis that the Union Jack in the pennant’s corner is both out of date and no longer represents the country’s identity. “The design of the New Zealand flag symbolises a colonial and post-colonial era whose time has passed," Mr Key said earlier this month.

Abbott’s embrace of such a proposition may well prove a moat – or title – too far.

Canada’s experience may have made interesting reading for the Prime Minister if he had delved into the issue there. The Canadians have a long and contentious history of argument about imperial versus home-grown honours. As things stand, Canada confers an Order of Canada suite of awards that have been in place since 1972, and in part inspired the Whitlam-era reforms. There is no sign of backsliding on this in Ottawa, ­notwithstanding that a conservative government led by
Stephen Harper
is in power.

Cricketers and newspapermen

An interesting sidelight on arguments that have ebbed and flowed in Canada over the years is the standoff on titles that occurred between newspaper publisher
Conrad Black
and then prime minister
Jean Chretien
. Chretien prevented Black accepting a life peerage – he became Lord Black of Crossharbour – until he had renounced his Canadian citizenship.

In the event the Republican
Rupert ­Murdoch
was offered a life peerage – Lord Murdoch of Yass! – Abbott would be most unlikely to follow the Chretien example.

Further into the realm of speculation Abbott was asked whether the former Australian spin bowler
Shane Warne
would be considered for a knighthood to which he replied: “I don’t think we’re going to see Sir Shane anytime soon."

But if he was to consider the Caribbean example he would find there is no shortage of precedent for awarding titles to cricketing greats. We could name a formidable cricket XI from the recipients, including Conrad Hunte, Richie Richardson, Vivian Richards, Everton Weekes, Frank Worrell, Garry Sobers, Clyde Walcott, Learie Constantine, Curtly Ambrose, Wes Hall, and Andy ­Roberts. Meanwhile back on the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy website we are reminded of the various perfidies of Labor leaders who have deep-sixed the imperial honours systems.

Whitlam was accused of “disturbing and persistent" failings in his refusal to honour the outgoing McMahon government’s New Year’s Honours List in 1973, and
Neville Wran
was taken to task for a similar ­infraction on taking over from
Sir Eric Willis
in 1976.

Whitlam earns the particular ire of the ACM. It accused him of a “mean-spirited caprice". That “caprice’’ has now been reversed, to an extent.